Exactly How Canadian Is Scott Pilgrim vs. the World?

Michael Cera’s new movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which opens today, is based on a comic-book series by Bryan Lee O'Malley. So it should come as no surprise that Scott Pilgrim draws many references from the geek canon—music from Zelda, Street Fighter–esque brawls, and abrupt cuts that smack of comic-book paneling. However, Scott Pilgrim is set in Toronto, Canada, and pays homage to the locale. (O'Malley is from a city just outside Toronto.) A former resident of the Great White North breaks down the Canadiana:

Pizza Pizza: This pizza chain—the largest in Ontario—gets some screen time. The stores are everywhere, and the pizza is passable, but it’s the orange-and-white tiling of the stores and the pizza boxes that is instantly identifiable to anyone who has ever lived out their adolescence in Canada, including, apparently, Michael Cera's uncle.

Second Cup: Several characters in Scott Pilgrim work at Second Cup, which is a popular coffee chain that might be described as Starbucks’s homely cousin. Everything takes forever and the shops are like cozy parlors, complete with cheesy watercolors and plush seating, but their Italian sodas are the best.

Funny money: Every time Scott defeats an evil ex he is showered in coins, specifically Canadian Loonies and Twoonies (Canadian for one- and two-dollar coins). The former are 11-sided bronze coins, so-called because of the loon, a particularly sleek anatine bird, gracing the tails side. The latter's nickname is either a portmanteau or a reference to the coin's two metal tones—a nickel outer ring and a bronze-colored inner ring. Like on all Canadian coins, Queen Elizabeth II is heads!

Lee's Palace: Several scenes take place at this beloved rock venue. (Scott is in a band, after all.) Even though the film wasn’t shot on location, I can say from experience that it’s a spot-on replica. Like every other young person in Ontario, I saw Canadian supergroup Broken Social Scene play Lee's back in high school, so I found myself getting nostalgic when the band's ballad “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl" started playing faintly in the movie.

Michael Cera’s SARS and Plumtree T-shirts: You can’t really overestimate the paranoia that surrounded the 2003 SARS “epidemic.” That year, when returning to Canada from the States, I was detained at customs for hours because I’d had some asthma problems on the plane. After SARS passed, everyone—the government, the news—seemed pretty embarrassed at the overreaction. Pilgrim pays his respects to this panicky period in Canadian history with a T-shirt. Plumtree is a Canadian all-girl rock group that disbanded in 2000, but everyone still has a soft spot for them and the days when the girls got endless Canadian college-radio play. Their sweet, yearning song “Scott Pilgrim” apparently inspired the comic-book character’s name, so it’s only fitting that he would wear one of Plumtree's shirts in the movie. They are already being hawked on eBay.